Beside a statue of Mordecai Anielewicz, the hero of the Warsaw uprising, dripped a crude cartoon of an Auschwitz-bound train. Below an engraved procession of victims looped rows of hateful graffiti: “Hitler, thanks for the Holocaust,” “Israel is the secular Auschwitz,” and so on.

But the neat cursive writing was not in Arabic; it was in Hebrew. And although the police have not identified any suspects, a museum spokeswoman told The Daily Beast, it’s almost certain that the can-wielding vandals were haredim, or ultra-orthodox Jews. Yad Vashem’s chairman, Avner Shalev, has already told the press that one of the tags was signed “World Haredi Jewry.” According to a guide at the site who asked not to be named, a few key grammatical errors in the Hebrew would confirm authorship by a member of the ultra-orthodox—many of whose first language is Yiddish. “Arabs didn’t write this,” he told me, visibly shaken.

This latest news is particularly disturbing. Not just because the vandals made Nazi references to Israeli policies that don’t comport with the Ultra Orthodox lifestyle. But because of where they did it.

This isn’t the Knesset building or the prime minister’s residence. Yad Vashem is not a political arena. It is a global monument—a reminder of the worst that humanity has to offer and the strength to rebuild in the aftermath of such atrocities. It doesn’t matter that the Ultra Orthodox have a different perspective on the cause of the Holocaust, that they many oppose Zionism.

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